E.I.
Further references: BENE GESSERIT entries; Princess Irulan Atreides, ed. The Dunebuk, Rakis Kef. Cat. 7-Z331.
MOHIAM, REVEREND MOTHER GAIUS HELEN.
A skilled teacher, intrepid guide, steadfast guardian, inspired prophetess, formidable adversary; she served as Supreme Head of the Council of the Sisterhood during and after the reign of Duke Leto Atreides. She was ordained by time and her Order to be instrumental in the drama of the House of Atreides, her part culminating in the contest of wills she eventually played out with Paul Atreides, later Muad'Dib. The antagonism reputedly flourished from the time the two first met: on the fateful day when Reverend Mother Gaius Helen administered the test of gom jabbar to the young Paul.
Often feared for the power she exercised over her most successful pupils — notably the Lady Jessica — and for her influence as confidante and Truthsayer to the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV, she was believed to be the master strategist of Bene Gesserit planning and diplomacy. The lengthy file on Reverend Mother Gaius Helen, found in the hoard at Dar-es-Balat, reveals her many functions and activities as primarily political in nature, especially in her later years. Even her educational endeavors were purportedly prompted by political motives as, for example, the teaching and training of Jessica and Princess Irulan.
She was most highly regarded for her prowess as an observer. Documents in her file attest to her status as "Bene Gesserit with the Sight," one whose abilities to test a subject's claim to human status went unmatched. In all matters relating to the Sisterhood, she enjoyed a power and prestige rare in the annals of the Bene Gesserit. Although among her peers she was thought proud, even fiercely so, outside the venerable Sisterhood her arrogance prompted such epithets as "witch," "sorceress," and, in the Fremen, kalbat Bani Jeziret, "'bitch of the Bene Gesserit." She was often accused of foretelling the future and then plotting to make it happen. It is certainly true that she was in perfect harmony with all the previous generations who had envisioned and planned the so-called perfect breeding program, thereby plotting for possession and control of human destiny.
She came from a long line of Reverend Mothers bred out of the age of despair; and like them she was empowered with two gifts. She possessed the gift of prescience or illumination, and the power of solitary conception. She could bring forth, spiritually, her own kind. Schooled in chemistry, anatomy, astronomy, medicine, and metaphysics, she, like her sisters, was a master of manipulation. Reverend Mother Gaius Helen was renowned, too, for self-induced trancelike states, a fixity of attention so total that it could block out all signals of the external environment and of surface consciousness. She was reported to be an adept at the Tarot pack, that game of both contemplation and action that was believed to contain the sum of all problems in its infinite permutations.
The range of Reverend Mother Gaius Helen's powers enabled her to successfully engage in conspiracies to place a Bene Gesserit on the throne of the Imperium, to infiltrate the ranks of Muad'Dib and to attempt to wrest control from Paul and place it in the hands of the Sisterhood, all of which incurred Paul's everlasting enmity and suspicion. One such conspiracy, labeled as treachery by some sources, was Reverend Mother's plan for brother-sister crossbreeding in the hope of securing the pure breeding line of legend. It was Reverend Mother's mission to prevent Paul from establishing an Imperial line through his beloved Chani, thereby disrupting the Sisterhood's carefully designed program already jeopardized by Jessica's default. Operating by indirection and secrecy, the chief guardian of the Bene Gesserit sought to protect the pyramid of generations she believed had reached its apex in Paul Atreides. But the antagonism between the two led eventually to Gaius Helen's confinement under guard by Paul's command, and later her execution as a traitor by Alia's order.
This ignominious end to a brilliant and inspired ministry, marred somewhat by her zealousness and fanaticism, gave muted and somber inflection to the litany of praise trumpeted from Wallach IX following Reverend Mother Gaius Helen's death. The Parchment of Sacred Adulation, a traditional memorial for Reverend Mothers, pays homage to her "discipline of self-surrender and true self-resignation, the self-naughting that is the way of greatness."
The testimony of Gaius Helen's own diary, while understandably self-serving in some ways, contributes no small insight into this extraordinary and paradoxical figure. Those dossiers dated shortly before she left the Bene Gesserit homeworld on her final ill-fated errand of complicity and political intrigue, provide invaluable clues to the character and motives of a crucial link in the history of the Imperium during those years. (To what extent the public person accurately mirrored the private one is perhaps best judged by comparing Gaius Helen's own declarations with those words and deeds ascribed to her by Harq al-Harba in his great history plays.) Those last pages of her personal diary, confiscated by Paul Atreides after her arrest, read:
When I was a child, I dreamed a dream three times in succession. In my dream, I saw a hooded figure who, with an arrow, shot the sun out of the sky. Have I been seeing my destiny, or Paul Atreides'? Which of us is the archer and which the sun? And though I have seen all this and more, yet I failed to see much since that time when I first confronted the young Paul and tested him.
Lately, I have been besieged by that incandescent memory whose traditions and aims I have always served. Soon I will join them, having added my own identity to that long line of silently articulate and everpresent mothers of the human being. Will Jessica guide the future then?
Since I can remember, my path has ever been straight in design but, by necessity, devious in execution. I have indeed been unrelenting and unyielding in my dedication to the cause of directed human evolution in order to achieve, in the end, what was envisioned so long ago: our Kwisatz Haderach.
True, I have had to pick my way with infinite care between the shoals of contemplation and action — a difficult course. In contemplation, I made myself a vehicle for the voices of the past, the immortal spirits of the ages all devoted to the same task. I became the via vocis. But then what was I to do? Was I to be the forming hand of the future or the malleable material some other hands would use for achieving that end? The dilemma was confounding, but demanded resolution. I chose.
Now I wonder if I have lived too long. Will the Bene Gesserit dream be abandoned for a vision less demanding, perhaps more arbitrary in nature? On occasion I have wondered if we of the Sisterhood have not undermined our own purpose. We built our house with the materials of faith, dedication, obedience, and hope. Do we subvert now, by our means, the very end we dreamed of achieving? Dare I question now what the Sisterhood has made — what I have helped it to become — and not question my own role in that making? Have we finally become, for all our intentions, like in principle to that which we sought to replace so long ago?
Such doubts are dangerous. Yet they come, unbidden, from the collective memory of the past, like shadows flickering unsteadily against the dark wall of my mind. But I am too old for such nonsense. To cast doubt now would be disastrous, for all our future hangs in the balance. Our cause has an enemy on the throne, his powers and resources perhaps greater even than my own. How strange that it should finally come to this: our best hope, the House of Atreides, now our greatest threat. Ah, my dear Jessica, how could you have abandoned us and all I have taught you?
Obedience to an idea is an active virtue, an act of imagination that encompasses the future and contains the necessary discipline. It is not for the discrete present to be preserved, but the whole of what may be shaped and designed and constructed to our model. I wish to be that hand of destiny. The Chosen One shall have to wrestle with his Daemon — also a chosen one. For I, too, am chosen.
In the Tarot, I have seen patches of all the enigmas of time and space. They come as lightning visions, moving me from the path of contemplation to the center of all action. My position has become clearer from that day I initiated Jessica's boy into the mysteries of gom jabbar. We were to become respectful foes, skilled adversaries,
struggling one with the other to reach the source of Becoming, control of an infinitely various and variable future we could both clearly see and each wanted to possess.
Now I am grown old and frail, and almost spent, in the service of this passion handed down to me and of which I have been caretaker for so long. I saw it as a dazzling sceptre — indescribably old, immeasurably rich. Still, it has seemed to me at times almost too studded with tradition, too bejeweled with sacrifice, too heavily plated with precious meaning, to carry for very long. Yet, with the passing generations, I have gripped it ever more tightly even as I felt myself buckling under its weight.
That collapse is near. I will fall prey to an abomination (what a travesty!), a fact of the contingent, malevolent, darkly playful universe that not even one like myself can always foresee. It is this paradox of existence, the coexistence of all opposites of which I myself am a part, that is the most difficult to manage.
The black aba conceals, more than the tired flesh and weary spirit of this witch-crone of history. I loved Jessica and she failed me, as she has failed all the past. So was rewarded my trust. So began the ritual of betrayal which will end in death without peace.
What future, bright or dim, can our species hold if there is no plan, no obedience to the code, no faith in the righteousness of the mothers who would preserve, refine, and renew by withstanding the allure of the vacant present for the treasure of what can be? I have knowledge that runs backward, like tiny pebbles marking the steps of a path already traversed, to the beginning. What I cannot see is the end that is a new beginning lost in the future.
The keeper of the treasure that lies beyond must guard it with diligence, even with cruelty. I have guarded the entrance to the future, and I must be defeated in order to win. I, too, must fulfill a destiny. Should that be as the enemy of him who is the One? He and I will end together. Shall we begin together, too? It will be the time of our passing and, with it, the time of inhumanity will once again descend upon us for a long age.
My obligation is the preservation of the heroic aims passed from age to age, growing in stature and power as they were handed on. If that tradition is threatened or diluted, then too is the hope we have cherished forever. Our ideal of the human must advance and be upheld with authority and by authority. And it must remain within our control, or all we have achieved will revert back again to the mechanical sterility we fought to overcome. That must never be.
We will have created a model that can and will inspire a whole race whom we can then also guide and teach. We will have achieved a race of men we can succor as seedlings, nurture as shoots, tend and crossbreed, that the flower of genius may be ever renewed. The truth of this vision has on occasion, I do believe, banished the quality of pity in me. I have labored too long in the vineyard of a passion: to create the perfect fruit from which shall spring a burgeoning human garden.
And this will be my, our, legacy to the future. For we are the mythmakers, the foundation, the rock; and all else is as sand in the wind. Construximus monumentum perennius illud imperatorum.
MOTHER OF JESSICA.. References found both in Book of the Voices, the journals of Duncan Idaho-13015, and in Lady Ghanima's Commentaries to the Voices add startling information about R.M. Gaius Helen Mohiam's relationship to the Atreides line. One question that had always bothered Ghanima (and Empire historians and geneticists) was the identity of her father's maternal grandmother. His Harkonnen background apparently distressed Paul Muad'Dib; the clash of Harkonnen and Atreides blood was al-Harba's theme in the memorable Arrakeen Tarot (10304). The playwright, when dealing with Paul's awareness of himself as the genetic climax of an extended breeding program, gives Paul the famous soliloquy:
Blood. Blood. Blood. Blood. Blood.
I've wallowed in out-freyn gore so long
That shedding the body's water of one more
Harkonnen rabble is but to kiss my crysknife
And wet it in my very veins. Harkonnen-Atreides.
Atreides-Harkonnen. It's all the same, and now at last
I'll cry no more nor shed a solitary tear
For any scum.
It is myself I weep for: brute
From long dead Vladimir; love from absent Jessica;
Strength from that father who did die too soon,
And who knows what from that nameless woman who bedded
That young Baron and damned my mother.
Blood. Blood. Blood. Blood. Blood. (AT II, iii, 26-38)
Al-Harba focused directly on the question of Paul's unknown grandmother, in the playwright's exquisite pun, that "nameless worn-in" who "damned" Paul's mother. The artist so often perceives more clearly than the historian.
There is also evidence that information identifying Jessica's mother was censored and destroyed by Leto II. the Welbeck Abridgement of the Bene Gesserit annual empire assessment indicates that in 12335, when Bene Gesserit historians, in an attempt to increase the annual supply of melange for The Sisterhood, threatened to reveal the God Emperor's complete ancestry, he assassinated them en masse and destroyed the portion at the Mikkro-Fishedotte which detailed his ancestry. Although Leto razed the B.G. records, he did not tamper with his sister's notes, and through Ghanima's patient work with the Voices the truth was preserved.
During her work with the memory Voices, Ghanima found herself singularly attracted to Voices with variations of one name: Ellen, Elena, Helen, Elaine, Eleanor, Helene. For reasons unknown to her, she and Harq al-Ada also named two of their daughters Eleanor and Helene. She sought the source of this yearning, seeking out all the Voices bearing the general name. As she worked her way through a myriad of Elaines and Helenes, she found an increasing number of Matres Executrice using the name. Much to her frustration, though, whenever she tried to communicate with women historically close to her, she found that both her grandmother Jessica and her father Paul blocked the Voices. Jessica finally convinced Ghanima that they were shielding her from the danger of Abomination, from a voice capable of controlling her. So, for seventy-nine years, Ghanima continued her work, avoiding the Voices close to her historically. But decades of pent-up curiosity finally drove her to try once more to contact the near Voices. With he help of her mother, Chani — her ever willing "Guard to the Portal of Memory" — Ghanima finally managed to break through Jessica's and Paul's suppression. As recorded in Book of the Voices, to Ghanima's astonishment, she heard the voice of her great-grandmother, Gaius Helen Mohiam:
As soon as I entered the prana-bindu suspension, I heard a small, shadow voice, fighting its way through my grandmother's suppression: "Hear me! I will not hurt you. You are blood of my blood and seed of my precious line. I am Helen, your great-grandmother, child. As I tested your father, now can I test you. You are more human than he, for you are not afraid of your humanity.
Thus Ghanima discovered what her brother, father and grandmother had tried to delete from history — that the Atreides not only had Harkonnen blood but also that of a powerful Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother.
Ghanima's Commentaries explains the Harkonnen-Mohiam connection. A very young-looking Helen using the name Tanidia Nerus, had been sent to the Harkonnens as a concubine. Her assignment was to seduce Vladimir and produce a daughter (who, with the Atreides line would produce the mother of a Kwisatz Haderach). Obviously, the relationship proved displeasing to both parties, and though Helen did become impregnated, Jessica was her only child. As to the effect on Harkonnen, Gaius Helen seemed sure that she was his one and only female partner. She denied his later sexual preferences had anything to do with the one night she had spent with him. After bearing Jessica and leaving her at a Bene Gesserit Kinder House to be raised, Gaius Helen went on to become a Reverend Mother, adept at the "Sight." She confirmed that she had become a member of the triumvirate, a Mater Executrix. From the records of these conversations with Ghanima, we understand the Reverend Mother as a powerful woman with only one goal — to gain the power of the Empire for the Bene Gesserit.
J.A.C. and G.E.
Further references: ATREIDES, LADY JESSICA; HARKONNEN-BENE GESSERIT entries; NERUS, TANIDIA; R.M. Gaius Helen Mohiam, Diaries, Lib. Conf. Temp. Series 133; Lady Jessica and Ghanima Atreides, Book of the Voices, Rakis Ref. Cat. 1-BG164, BG165, BG166; Ghanima Atreides, Commentaries to the Voices, Rakis Ref. Cat. 37-BG132; Anon., The Welbeck Fragment, Lib. Conf. Temp. Series 578; Anon., R.M. Gaius Helen Mohiam, Rakis Ref. Cat. 70-BG518.
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NAVIGATIONAL MACHINE DEVELOPMENT
Earliest records of intersystem travel, both interstellar and intergalactic, are of course incomplete; our knowledge is based largely on newly translated files from the Rakis Hoard. We know that the beginning of true travel waited for the utilization of the well-established and well-understood phenomenon of spacefold. However, it was not until the polymathematician I.V. Holtzman developed the area of nonlinear diffeostochastic transformations and applied them to three-spaced simple motion that the dependency on curvilinear momentum in travel was broken. Shortly thereafter the first form of the photonharmonic oscillatory engine was developed, allowing a ship to travel in a neobrownian curvature somewhat similar to the time-light-particle phenomenon. In turn this development permitted the first translight portation.
The Dune Encyclopedia Page 84
